Anthony Painter says the West must not be blinded by the economic opportunities China offers and resist the repression it practices
AS POLICE batons and tear gas rained down on protesters in Lhasa, the Chinese government’s brutality and intransigence reminiscent of Tiananmen Square was all-too evident. Whatever is happening in Tibet has nothing to do with democracy or human rights. But is it just a domestic Chinese political matter? Just as Turkey has the Kurds, Russia the Chechens and Spain the Basques, so China has the Tibetans and Uyghurs of Xinjiang. But China is different. China’s problems will become our problems, too.
In recent years, there has been a sanitisation of discourse concerning China. Where concerns were raised at the trampling of democracy in 1989, we have subsequently allowed economic convenience to blind us to the greatest foreign policy challenge since the collapse of the Cold War. A regional power has the potential to become a global one and provides a viable alternative to respect for democracy and human rights. An umbrella of authoritarianism is already providing a protective canopy for the unsavoury regimes of Burma, Sudan and North Korea. China is not so much an economic miracle but a geo-political catastrophe in the making. History is being re-born before our eyes.
There have been “economic miracles” before. Japan was transformed from a war-devastated nation into a world-beater. The Japanese case is interesting in relation to China. By combining high savings rates, with pegged exchange rates under-valuing the yen, a bureaucratically-driven system that promoted massive levels of capital investment backed-up by huge foreign exchange reserves and a production-line education system, the Japanese economy was fast approaching per capita levels of wealth in the United States by the early 1990s. Global firms that were genuine market leaders, such as Toyota, Sony and Suzuki, grew in a protected domestic market.
It came to a shuddering halt. Whereas Japanese gross domestic product per capita was 83 per cent of that of the US in 1992, World Bank figures show it had declined to only 73 per cent by 2007. And the seeds of decline were contained in Japan’s economic success. The massive build-up of capital was unsustainable without spectacular productivity increases. As more and more capital was ploughed into chasing increasingly elusive growth, an inflationary bubble grew and eventually burst, leaving bad debts, bankrupt financial institutions and junk assets in its wake.
While the past 15 years have not easy for Japan, they could have been far worse. Japan’s democratic institutions and large savings pool were able to cushion much of the impact of economic decline. However, the growth-at-all-costs strategy has demonstrated its obvious limitations.
Now, as Western politicians wake up to the spectacular rates of economic growth in China, its 1.3 billion people are seen as a supply chain ready to be exploited. Who could not be impressed by growth rates approaching 10 per cent for two decades? But we should be more circumspect.
In The Writing on the Wall, Will Hutton describes the emerging imbalances in the Chinese economy. Without a skein of “enlightenment institutions”, as Hutton calls them – the rule of law, civil society, pluralist democracy, civil, political and social rights – the Chinese economy is doomed.
The obvious comparison is with Japan: huge growth, driven through exploitation of US and European markets, underpinned by a reservoir of foreign exchange reserves and savings, with capital politically and bureaucratically directed towards further high growth.
But inflation in China is beginning to rocket – reaching 8.7 per cent in February this year. Inequality means this will hit the Chinese hard – especially those who live away from the economically prosperous coastal regions. The number of Chinese unemployed could already be greater than the entire population of the United Kingdom. When China’s economy goes off the rails, the global social and environmental costs will be immense.
Paul Krugman, the US economist, sees China’s growth strategy as comparable with that of the Soviet Union. Long after the Soviet economy started to groan under the strain of weak productivity growth, it remained a world power. This is the real challenge to the West. China’s strategy is not just about growth, it is also about national self-determination. China will trade, but wants to determine the nature of its economy, political system and foreign policy.
If we truly believe there should be a moral dimension to foreign policy – one that advocates human rights, democracy, and environmental concern – we cannot afford to treat China as simply another trading block. It is not just another irritating autocratic political regime to be disapproved of but tolerated for reasons of self-interest. The mixed approach of trade combined with occasional outbursts of moral outrage is nowhere near enough.
China poses the first potentially global post-Soviet challenge for the US and Europe. It is not just what goes on within its own borders that matters, but its broader influence in Africa, India and Pakistan, the Middle East and south-east Asia which amplifies domestic injustices and cripples international institutions.
By focusing on China’s economy, we’ve missed the point. It’s China’s geo-political ambitions that should concern us most. China has to change both its domestic and international policies, if it is to be an equal partner.
In a breathtaking example of throwing away all your bargaining chips before the game has begun, the International Olympic Committee gave the 2008 Olympic Games to China in return for reassurances about the improvement of human rights conditions. Violent repression is how the Chinese government has responded.
The Olympics represent a huge opportunity to give a clear answer to that. Although there is pressure to boycott the opening ceremony of the Olympic Games, that would be a mistake. It would be better to protest at every location through which the Olympic torch passes. No media coverage of the torch should be without banners in support of human rights and the people of Tibet, Darfur and Burma.
We should not want China’s president Hu Jintao and prime minister Wen Jiabao to look at the company that they have at the Olympic opening ceremony and see only North Korea’s dictator Kim Jong-Il, Sudan’s president Omar Hassan Al-Bashir and members of the Burmese junta. They should also see leaders of democracies. But those leaders should make clear their objection to China’s policy of repression at home and support for murderous regimes abroad.
That should be the beginning of a co-ordinated policy of pressure from China’s biggest external markets – the US and the European Union – for China to change its ways. What’s needed is a new policy of critical engagement.
As Hu Jia, the human rights activist currently on trial in China, puts it:
“Only by adhering to the principles of human rights and through open dialogue can the world community pressure the Chinese government to change. Ignoring these realities and tolerating barbaric atrocities in the name of the Beijing Olympics will disgrace the Olympic Charter and shake the foundations of humanity.”
We owe it to Hu and others who have been silenced by the Chinese state to turn his words into a workable and effective geo-political strategy.
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